Cellmate killer put on death row

STOCKTON - State prisoner John Joseph Lydon was sentenced to death Thursday for the murder of his cellmate at Tracy's Deuel Vocational Institution, the second time he had killed an inmate in prison.

Jennie Rodriguez-Moore

STOCKTON - State prisoner John Joseph Lydon was sentenced to death Thursday for the murder of his cellmate at Tracy's Deuel Vocational Institution, the second time he had killed an inmate in prison.

Lydon, 39, is the first person condemned to death in San Joaquin County since September 2008, when serial rapist and murderer William Jennings Choyce was sentenced to death.

Lydon, who had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, was convicted of first-degree murder and found sane in the 2010 strangling of Jonathan Guy Alexander, who had been imprisoned on a child sex conviction.

Deputy District Attorney Robert Himelblau said his office sought capital punishment because Lydon murdered more than once. And to not pursue death, he said, would put correctional officers at risk.

"The jury did a really conscientious job," he said. "It's been a job for the people and a job demanded by the people."

But whether his execution will actually be carried out remains a question.

Lydon will join about 725 other death row inmates awaiting their punishment in California. His sentence was issued seven years to the day after California halted capital punishment.

No executions have taken place in California since, as courts are determining whether the lethal injection - the only method currently authorized in California - exposes the condemned inmates to cruel and unusual punishment.

"These delays are causing an erosion of the public confidence," Himelblau said, adding there are death convictions more than 20 years old still in the appeals process.

Deputy Public Defender Michael Bullard, however, believes Lydon does not deserve to be on death row.

Bullard believes it was "criminally negligent" for Deuel to place Alexander and Lydon in the same cell despite the inmates' backgrounds.

"I'm particularly shocked by the Department of Corrections' behavior in putting John in the cell," Bullard said.

Lydon, who says he was sexually abused as a child, maintains he had told Deuel staff he didn't want to be housed with any child molesters.

Lydon's previous victim at Coalinga's Pleasant Valley Prison in 2004 also was a convicted child molester.

In arguing for Lydon's life, defense attorneys presented testimony that Lydon's childhood was marked by sexual abuse at the hands of Boston's defrocked Catholic Priest John Geoghan, and beatings and neglect from his parents.

Geoghan also was murdered in a prison where he was serving a sentence for child molestation charges.

Bullard is disappointed in the verdict.

"I think the whole thing is a shame," he said. "I don't think that John deserves to be executed given all the circumstances of the case."